Episode 9: Jeanne de Kroon
Dutch designer and social justice and climate advocate Jeanne de Kroon is making waves with her fashion label Zazi Vintage, founded in 2017. Her collections are lovingly handcrafted by local female artisans from places like Tajikistan and Afghanistan. With every one of these ladies, Jeanne has a personal bond. This way she doesn’t just support ancient crafts that might otherwise be forgotten, but she also co-creates with these communities and gives them a platform. Jeanne is shifting the gaze from the model to the maker. Briefly working as a model when she was younger, made her realize how incredibly wasteful the fashion industry is and that it’s time for massive systemic change. She also collaborates with the United Nations to really make a difference. In this episode, she touches on all things sustainability: from the blind spots of greenwashing to how to make sustainable living attainable for all. She talks about empowering women and her favorite women’s stories. She opens up about cultural appropriation versus appreciation, decolonization, indigenous culture, connecting back to nature, and how she finds balance. While Jeanne has always been somewhat of a nomad, during lockdown she has settled down on a houseboat in Amsterdam surrounded by nature and her much-loved chickens.
Sustainable Fashion
“If you really start to work together as women and make a communal story through cloth then something so magical can arise.”
“For centuries and centuries if you look at cloth on a really base level, you always see two elements: nature and community. At a certain point in time we started to shift that gaze from the maker to the model and by glamourising it, you could never really connect to that story because it’s not real.”
“I feel like when I buy a garment, I want to feel the story of its maker loud and clear. I want to feel her craft, her ancestors, her knowledge, her wisdom.”
“I feel like whenever you do work with another country for production of cloth, you should value that country for its legacy and craft and for that it’s the most important topic of fashion.”
“Sustainability is not for sale. Sustainability has to do something with how you relate to your clothing. Brands have an inherent responsibility for facilitating that connection. Brands are nothing more than storytellers of cloth.”
RACIAL JUSTICE
“In the end, for me the de-colonisation is just like a way of re-falling in love with the world, because we truly learn to see others for what they are and that they are not others, but same.”
“The greatest act of activism is not pointing fingers but listening and reaching out with your hand.”
NATURE
“You are nature and nature is you, and I think in Western society at some point we have put ourselves above nature.”
MOTHERHOOD
“What I mostly see in the communities I work with is sacred sisterhood, and that it is what we need as women around us. The feeling of the collective instead of me against the world with a baby.”
“It’s my biggest wish to become a mother one day and to give all my love and heart to this tiny little creature.”